During the two hundred years which closed with the eighteenth century there had appeared four world-famous books, which, though they were not intended for them, English-speaking children almost at once appropriated and made peculiarly their own; while another book written specially for children lay unheeded and unnoticed even in the land of its origin for years. Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” published in 1688 for grown-up saints, was seized upon and read with avidity by little sinners. “Robinson Crusoe” came out in 1714, and fell upon immortality in the same way; and “Gulliver’s Travels,” in 1726, was speedily annexed by the little folk, who were ignorant of its satirical purposes, but revelled in the direct simplicity of its narrative. Then came “Munchausen,” in 1785, intended to ridicule the extravagance of the travellers’ tales of the times; but knowing nothing and caring as much about this, the little ones fastened on it also for similar reasons.

The fairy tales long current throughout Europe and especially in France, which Charles Perrault, or perhaps his son, or perhaps both, first wrote out and published in French under the title of “Contes de ma mère l’Oye” (Tales of Mother Goose) in 1697, began to become popular in England only in the period when “Gulliver” and “Robinson Crusoe” appeared, when the dying down of Puritan fervor and the rekindling of interest in child-life in the eighteenth century had lit that fire in England which burns as brightly to-day, both there and in this country, as that other fire which Master Ridley was cheered by his fellow-martyr, Latimer, into believing would “not be easily put out.”

As the Puritan influence in England grew fainter, these books came into greater favor, and New England came lingering somewhat slowly behind at first in its appreciation of them. Before 1794, however, J. T. Buckingham tells us that he owned “Robinson Crusoe,” “Goody Two Shoes,” “Tom Thumb” and half a dozen other books of a similar character; although in 1786 the library of a farmer in Connecticut consisted of the Bible, Doddridge’s “Rise and Progress of Religion,” Watts’s psalms and hymns and lyric poems, which he says “much puzzled and exercised the youthful mind.” In 1794 Buckingham had “Gulliver’s Travels,” “The History of the Pirates,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “Tristram Shandy,” “Tom Jones,” “The Letters of Junius” and the eighth volume of “The Spectator.” By 1810 the range had grown wider, for George Lunt tells us in his book already quoted that, though original American productions were few, the importation from abroad not large, and the demand for reprints a good deal limited, their library consisted of “The Scottish Chiefs,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” Miss Edgeworth’s books, “Mrs. Grant of Laggan,” the novels of Charlotte Smith, the memoirs of Baron Trenck; the young folks “perused stealthily” “Peregrine Pickle,” and in poetry Henry Kirke White and Montgomery were favorites.

The world owes much to Oliver Goldsmith, that “gentle master,” who “left scarcely any kind of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn”; but the world will probably never know just how much it owes to him for what he and John Newbery did together for children’s literature. During the period of Goldsmith’s closest intimacy with his publisher, and while living under his roof,